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In 2007 phpBB stepped into a new era with its release of the now infamous “prosilver” theme. One decade ago we pushed the envelope of what a forum should look like, how it should function, and how we build and customise themes.

This year we are announcing our plans to go where no forum has ever gone before. We are starting on a journey to venture outside the scope of our current galaxy to a place far far away.

In search of an experience so groundbreaking, so shocking, that you will not want to miss the excitement. So suit up and strap on your jetpacks in preparation for the launch of something revolutionary. In the following blog post, we will be outlining the plans for the coming time and show you some screenshot of things we’ve been working on.

Over the course of the next year or so we will update you on the progress and outline everything in complete detail. For now, you can see the full scope of some of the components we’ve been working on over here.

In relation to this we are also standing up a new Front-end Development team, as we will be leveraging a lot of advanced forward thinking processes, techniques, common practices, and technologies; more to come on the specifics. To do this we will need to bring on several new motivated and talented individuals to work on and help oversee this mission through.

With that said if you think this is something you may be interested in and/or are qualified for, please private message or email me with your qualifications, examples and a brief description of why you think you would make a good addition to this project.

After several months of preparations and many hours of travelling, most of our team members have arrived in Budapest for our annual team hackathon. Our meeting space was provided by L’Office Budapest. Their great team made sure we got to work in a nice environment in a lovely location. Thanks a lot for your hospitality!

Even though we’re only two days in, we’re already considering this meet-up another great success. Members from all of our different teams were present, along with GSoC student rubencm. We’ve been working on many different types of improvements for the project. A quick list of those improvements are as follows (even though we probably still miss a lot here):

Advertisement management is easily one of the most requested add-on features for phpBB. In phpBB 3.0, EXreaction’s Ad Management MOD was the 9th most downloaded MOD with over 66,000 downloads. For phpBB 3.1/3.2, community members ranked Ad Management as their 2nd most desired extension. The Extension Development Team at phpBB is happy to announce that we will be releasing an official Advertising Management extension for phpBB 3.2, created during our participation in the Google Summer of Code.

The extension developed by GSoC student Senky (see his code commits) and mentored by VSE and Derky covers most features board admins would need to implement ad code snippets or sell advertisement space on their boards.

How it works

At its most basic usage, an admin can paste HTML/JS code for an advertisement directly in ACP and select locations for this ad to display (14 locations are already available – along with pop-up and slide-up options). The ad will start to display immediately after it’s enabled.

Additional features

We’ve built into this extension various extra functionalities to help manage your board’s ads. You’re able to set a comment for each advertisement (i.e., info about advertiser, PPC, etc…). Set the priority level of the ad (ads with higher priorities will be displayed more often than other ads assigned to the same display location). Set a user as an owner of an ad, who is then able to see ad statistics in the UCP. Set an expiration date for an ad, after which the ad will automatically be disabled. The extension can analyse advertisement code for you, to check that your advertisement code is secure, optimised and safe to publish. You can also take advantage of the built-in banner upload mechanism to easily upload and create banner ads without having to use FTP or leave the ACP.

In addition to all that, the extension is able to count views and clicks for each ad, and optionally disable ads once they reach a certain number of views and/or clicks. If you designated an ad owner, they will be able to view their ads views and clicks stats in their UCP.

You can also disable advertisements from displaying to selected user groups, for example to allow your admins, moderators (or even registered users) an ad-free experience. We’ve also included an ad-blocker detector option that will display a polite message to users to consider disabling their ad-blocker on your site, in order to help support your site.

Performance

We did our best to optimise this extension for even the biggest boards – this extension performs only one additional database query (two with view counting enabled) per page load. However, we really look forward to your personal experiences with this extension to help us improve the performance and usability even more.

Future

This extension is not feature-frozen. We appreciate every comment, idea and bug report and will do our best to make this extension as powerful as possible without compromising performance.

You can track our continuing feature/planning list on Trello. We wish you the greatest revenues!

For extension developers

This extension is designed with extensibility in mind. Currently, it is already possible to accept new template locations defined in other extensions. If you have ideas on how to further extend this extension or would like to develop a rejected feature as an add-on to this extension, please ask us for any PHP/template events you may need us to add and we will be more than happy to prepare them for you.

The longer you spend developing software, the more seriously you start to take setting up the perfect development environment. And the more seriously you start to take following best practices. One of these practices is setting up a development environment that matches the production environment that you are using. There are a couple of reasons why this is beneficial. Firstly, if multiple developers are working on a project then you can be sure that code written by one person will work for the other developers. And secondly, when that code is deployed to a production environment you know that it should theoretically work straight away seeing it was written in a matching development environment.

A simple example of failing to do this would be if a developer was using a PHP7 development environment and wrote a statement which included the spaceship operator. If this code was then deployed on a PHP5 environment, the code would not work. If the developer, knowing that the production environment runs PHP5, had set up their development environment accordingly this bug would have been noticed much sooner.

At first impression, it seems impossible that a developer writing and testing code on their Windows PC can set up a local development environment that matches their live web server which in the vast majority of cases is running on Unix. But this is actually not the case, it is possible – and in fact, not all that difficult – to do this.

It can be done using a couple of Windows programs that enable the creation of virtual Unix machines. Basically what this means is that you can set up a lightweight Unix server that runs within Windows, so you can still use your favourite Windows text editors and tools but when it comes to running the code it will be run in Unix. In this article I’ll be looking at Vagrant and VirtualBox.

Note: This article assumes basic knowledge of the command line on Windows and Unix.

SETTING UP VAGRANT, VIRTUALBOX and PUTTY

The first step is to install VirtualBox, which Vagrant supports out of the box. VirtualBox is a program which allows for the management of virtual machines and can be downloaded from: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Use the default set up options.

Now Vagrant needs to be installed. Vagrant runs alongside VirtualBox to allow users to quickly provision new and different types of development environments. It can be downloaded from https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html and once again the default installation options should be used.

You can confirm that it’s correctly installed by rebooting your PC, and then opening Command Prompt (cmd.exe) and running the command “vagrant”. This should return example usage options.

Note: Version 1.94 of Vagrant seems to have a couple of bugs, which I encountered trying to install this on a Windows 7 machine (I know, I know! But it’s the only Windows PC I had access to). The first resulted in a number of error messages when running the “vagrant” command. This was resolved by running “vagrant plugin install vagrant-share –plugin-version 1.1.8”. The second bug resulted in errors when running “vagrant up”, which I resolved by replacing 3 files – the procedure is explained athttps://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/8520#issuecomment-297792410 – it appears this will be resolved in v1.95.

With Vagrant now installed, create a folder on your PC where you want your Vagrant projects. I called mine VagrantProjects. In your command prompt window, “cd” into this folder. Then run this command: “vagrant init”. This will create a Vagrantfile. This is a file where development environment settings are stored.

Now run “vagrant box add ubuntu/xenial64” – this will add an Ubuntu 16.04 virtual box, a new release of Ubuntu. It is worth bearing in mind that there are plenty of other boxes you can choose from. Some even have the LAMP stack pre-installed which if you want to save time could be a good option. You can view a list at https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search

The download may take some time on slower connections. When it’s complete, open Vagrantfile and modify this variable to have the listed value:

config.vm.box = “ubuntu/xenial64”

Note: these steps can be combined if you simply run “vagrant init ubuntu/xenial64”
Then run “vagrant up” while still in that directory.

Watch the messages in the command prompt window for the SSH username and password. You will need to note these down so when the virtual machine is running you can log into it.

Once the VM (virtual machine) has booted, you can open the VirtualBox application to confirm that it has indeed been created. If you run “vagrant status” you will see that the state is running.

Next, run “vagrant ssh” – on Windows it likely won’t work. But it will provide some important information. The host/port/username will be shown again but so will “private key” – this path is important.

An SSH client needs to be installed now. This is a client that allows you to log in to a remote server – but in this case it can be used to log in to the virtual machine. Putty is a very lightweight and effective client, and can be downloaded and installed from https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html – download both Putty and PuttyGen.

Firstly, open PuttyGen, click load, and the choose the private key path specified a moment ago. Then using the default settings, click save private key. I called it pg_private_key.ppk. This key is later used merely to authenticate you and grant you access to the virtual machine.

Now open Putty. In the first screen fill out these details, which should match the information Vagrant displayed to you earlier:

Under Connections -> Data you can enter under “auto login username” the username shown in the command prompt earlier. Then go to Sessions, and under Saved Sessions type “Vagrant”. Click “Save”. Now you will not have to perform this step again, you can simply double click “Vagrant” in the future to quick-load your VM.

Finally click open, and a new command window will appear. But this time, it’s your new virtual server!

From the Putty window, type “logout” to leave the session. And in the Windows command prompt window type “vagrant halt” to shutdown the virtual machine. “vagrant status” will confirm that the state is powered off.

INSTALLING THE LAMP STACK

The “Linux” part has been handled now, but to continue setting up a local development environment Apache, MySQL and PHP is still required.

Firstly, Apache can be installed by running the following commands (once you have logged into the VM through Putty):

So that development can take place in Windows, but run on the Linux virtual machine there needs to be some level of directory synchronisation. The final two commands create a symbolic link so you can store your files locally but also run on the webserver in the virtual machine.

On your local machine, inside the VagrantProjects folder create a new folder called html/ – this is important because of the way Apache is set up. In that folder, create a file called index.html and put this in it:

Now run “vagrant halt” followed up by “vagrant up” to restart the virtual machine.

Go to http://127.0.0.1:4567/index.html in your browser and you will see the file created above.

With Apache now running, let’s install MySQL:

sudo apt-get -y install mysql-server php7.0-mysql

When prompted, choose a password for the MySQL database.

You can test the connection from the command line (still using the Putty window, as it’s local to the virtual machine) by typing this command:

mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -u root -p

… and entering the password chosen above.

Pro tip: if you wanted to quickly run an SQL query, you can do it by typing the query after you’ve run the previous command. Type “CREATE DATABASE test;” to try it out. Enter “exit” to exit from the query window.

Now to install PHP7:

sudo apt-get -y install php libapache2-mod-php

phpBB requires the XML/DOM extension, so also run this:

sudo apt-get -y install php-xml

Now create a file called phpinfo.php in your html/ folder, and put this in it:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

And then run http://127.0.0.1:4567/phpinfo.php and you will see that PHP is running correctly. As this demonstrates, any files or subdirectories you put in the /html directory become accessible through the web server.

By this point, you have everything you need to install phpBB and you can use the “test” database that was created in an earlier step.

INSTALLING PHPMYADMIN

To install phpMyAdmin – a fantastic tool for viewing database tables and running queries in a visually appealing way – do the following. Run:

As software developers the most important aspect of the development process is setting up a local development environment. The vast majority of web servers run on Linux systems, but most consumer operating systems use Windows. This doesn’t preclude Windows users from developing PHP applications though. There are a number of ways to do this, such as using an emulator like Vagrant to create a virtualised Linux environment or actually installing the Linux operating system on your computer. But the easiest approach is to simply install an application which will allow PHP, MySQL and Apache to run on a Windows machine and the application I most like for this is called WAMP.

WAMP is a free program which can be downloaded from http://www.wampserver.com/en/. Select your operating system type and click on the download link.

Once downloaded, open the installer and select your desired language (English or French are the only options at this time). From here, follow the prompts – the default options should be sufficient.

Once set up, navigate to the www directory that WAMP has created (usually C:\wamp\www). This is where the webserver files are served from. For the purposes of this tutorial I created a subdirectory in here called “demo”.

Firstly, download the latest version of the QuickInstall tool – QuickInstall is an invaluable tool for developers because it allows multiple boards to be created with pre-defined settings and later managed at just a few clicks. Why this is so important is if, for example, you are developing multiple extensions you can easily set up a different board – a vanilla, brand new board – to test and develop each one on individually.

Extract the QuickInstall zip file contents into the “demo” folder.

Now, download the latest phpBB version from https://www.phpbb.com/downloads/ – v3.2.0 at the time of writing. When you extract the contents from the zip file, copy the “phpBB” folder to your clipboard. Now, go to \www\demo\quickinstall-master\sources and paste the folder here. This will be the source board that QuickInstall will use to create a new forum.

Finally the “boards”, “cache” and “settings” directories in QuickInstall need to be writable by PHP. This is all that needs to be done to set up a basic congifiguration of QuickInstall. If you now navigate to http://localhost/demo/quickinstall-master/ in your browser the setup page will be displayed, automatically displaying the Profiles tab.

Under database settings, enter “root” as the user and leave the password blank (these are the default WAMP settings; if you used something different then it’s important that it’s reflected here). In a real world environment you would never want to have a blank database password, but as this is strictly a local set up that nobody else will be accessing it will not pose a security problem.

The rest of the settings can be left as-is. I would however recommend under the admin settings using an easily memorable username and password though, because you may be accessing this test board very regularly, and under the populate board settings checking the Yes option just so you have some test data to work with.

Once you Submit this form, the Boards tab will become visible.

You can modify some settings such as the board name if you wish (handy if, as mentioned above, you wanted to create a different board for each different extension you are developing) but the only field that needs to be explicitly defined is the database/directory name. In the past I have just used an incremental naming system (“test_board_1”, “test_board_2”, etc) so I will use test_board_1 for this example, but you can use any name you want.

Once you click Submit, the button will be hidden momentarily. This is okay – due to the test data being inserted into the database it might take a little time for the board to be created. It shouldn’t take more than about a minute, after which point you will be automatically redirected to your test board and logged in:

At this point the board has been created in www\demo\quickinstall-master\boards\test_board_1 and a database created called “qi_test_board_1”. A great feature of WAMP is that it comes with phpMyAdmin, a web-based tool for manipulating MySQL databases and running queries. This can be accessed at http://localhost/phpmyadmin and you will see the new database listed there:

By this point you have a fully functioning phpBB testing environment which you can modify as you desire. Most aspiring developers will already have a text editor of choice, but if you are new to extension development there are a number of tools you can start out with. Notepad++ (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/) is a simple but powerful text editor which has been on the scene for many years; and is free. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles but it has syntax highlighting, auto-completion and a few other handy things which work well for PHP development. Another nice text editor which is a little more modern and feature-filled is Sublime (https://www.sublimetext.com). Technically it is a paid product, but you can download and use it for free if you can put up with periodic reminders to buy the program. Otherwise you can easily purchase a license on their site.

For more advanced developers a full-fledged IDE might be desirable and the best one I’ve used is PhpStorm. It’s the IDE of choice for a number of phpBB team members and has more features than you could possibly ever use; the highlights being powerful debugging capabilities, refactoring, testing facilities and version control integration (such as Git).

Now you can get started on your extension idea, or any other tweaks and modifications you wish to make to phpBB!

By now you may have heard about “Cloudbleed”, the recently discovered vulnerability affecting users of Cloudflare’s SSL proxy service. In short, websites that utilized the service were affected by a serious issue that resulted in sensitive data (including passwords, API keys, private information, etc.) being leaked. Some of this data was inadvertently cached by search engines and potentially intentionally gathered by “bad guys”.

phpBB.com does not utilize the Cloudflare SSL proxy service and is thus unaffected.

Having said that, hundreds of websites you do use were affected, and you should take this opportunity to reset your passwords, regenerate API keys, etc., especially on services of importance.

CloudFlare’s official post about the matter can be found on the CloudFlare Blog

Beginning with phpBB 3.2 Release Candidate 2, the phpBB package will include a VigLink extension.

Currently, we rely solely on ads served throughout phpBB.com to fund the project’s expenses, namely: web hosting, legal expenses, software licenses, travel expenses for community events, etc. Our ad revenue has been steadily declining for a long time because the unobtrusive ads we’re willing to serve to visitors are less and less profitable. We have explored a variety of alternate funding options, such as utilizing more profitable advertising or accepting donations, however we feel that these solutions would either be ineffective or result in tangible undesirable effects.

We believe that this is the best solution to our current problem, namely that it provides a necessary revenue stream for the project while not negatively affecting the usability of the phpBB software.

The new extension allows phpBB users to support the phpBB project or alternatively elect to monetize their forums using a service called VigLink. If you enable the VigLink extension, whenever a user follows a link from your forum to any of VigLink’s partner websites and performs certain actions (such as making a purchase), a referral credit will be generated. To be clear, this will only affect existing links and should be entirely unnoticeable. It can also be entirely disabled, at your discretion.

After installation, it will be up to you to pick between disabling or enabling VigLink to help support phpBB or to use your own VigLink Convert account to earn money with your board. In order to accommodate this newly added feature, we improved the overall look of the “Send statistics” page in the Admin Control Panel and extended it to support extensions:

To round out this series, we’ll look at the different categories of extensions that people like to download.

The list of extension categories is:

Official Extensions

Cosmetic

Tools

Security

Communication

Profile/User Control Panel

Add-Ons

Anti-Spam

Entertainment

Miscellaneous

Overview of extension categories:

It’s worth mentioning that the download figures will not add up to the total extension downloads from part four, because some extensions belong to more than one category.

Add-Ons are the most popular type of extension, most likely due to their broad nature, with all of the top 10 most downloaded extensions belonging to this category (among others).

Official Extensions get downloaded in huge numbers due to their high profile, while some of the most downloaded extensions like Board Announcements and Advanced BBCode Box 3.1 belong to the Communication category.

Interestingly Anti-Spam extensions don’t feature highly, but with that said it’s probably a good thing if additional measures are not required to keep the spambots at bay.

This brings to a conclusion the phpBB Numerology series. I hope those that appreciate their statistics – or have a general interest in phpBB and its user submitted customisations – have enjoyed these last five blog posts.

MODs, extensions and styles are what immediately come to mind when thinking of the phpBB.com customisation database, but there are other types of customisations too.

This part of phpBB Numerology takes a look at every type of customisation.

Overview of all customisation downloads:

There are some obvious anomalies in the data (like the Viewtopic Birthday MOD) which haven’t been removed from this raw analysis. With that said, this data still gives a fairly accurate representation of how people use the customisation database.

The first figure that sticks out in this table is the the 52.02 views per download for bbCode. This is disingenuous. Taking the fairly popular bbCode “Open URL in new window” as an example, it’s had 8026 views and 0 downloads. Why is this? Because there is nothing to download – the instructions are on the main contribution page: https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/bbcode/open_url_in_new_window/

MODs, due to their prevalence in the phpBB2 and phpBB 3.0 era, are still the undisputed king of the customisation database and will take some catching up. Styles may catch up in the medium term though, as it’s a forever expanding customisation type in phpBB 3.1.

It’s not surprising to see phpBB tools well represented on the list. AutoMOD and UMIL alone represented 208757 and 151820 downloads respectively – very popular tools. Converters and Bridges round out the top 8, being quite niche categories.

As noted earlier, the figures may be a little high due to anomalies but after taking into account off-site downloads through development topics and the like the numbers may actually be conservative. It’s therefore very pleasing for everyone involved in the phpBB community, and something to be very proud of, that phpBB customisations have exceed 15 million downloads.

For the fifth and final part of phpBB Numerology we’ll go back to where it all started – extensions – and take a closer look at the categories of extensions that are most popular.